Working Group – 29th August 2018

Here’s an overview of the Kirklees Democracy Commission Working Group meeting on Wednesday 29th August 2018. We’ve included a video summary, documents, information about how you can get involved, the full webcast, tweets and photos.

Summary of the meeting

At this meeting we discussed our ‘Networked councillors’ project which is about developing digital skills, confidence and content for civic good. We shared our outline approach to opening up our meetings, and we talked about how we can support councillors and citizens as part of regional devolution. We also heard updates about our “Putting councillors at the heart of the organisation” project and some of our other work.

How citizens can get involved

1. Networked councillors

We want to make sure that our democratic content is more useful for our citizens. So we plan to bring together a group of citizens who are interested in working with us to improve our democratic content. From this group, we will convene a panel to meet in person when there is a specific task or activity to complete. We will also ask for feedback using emails and other digital communications. We’ll be sharing further details of what’s involved and how to join, but you are very welcome to express an interest now by emailing: kirkleesdemocracy@gmail.com

2. Opening up our meetings

Our citizens told the Democracy Commission: “We can’t get involved if we don’t understand how things work”. With this in mind, we’ve begun some work to help make our meetings easier to understand and to get involved in. For example, here’s our video about how Full Council meetings work: